


Under One Roof

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Boy Meets Boy (Comic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-12-27
Updated: 2002-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-07 02:21:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There shall we dwell, there shall we mourn, there shall we live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Under One Roof

They had never really been friends until after the wedding. Mik could still capture the day in his mind's eye and sense the cross over that had eventually led to his life in the present. Harley and he had celebrated their seventh anniversary the month before. Harley was at his peak then, half-luscious boy child, half cynical savvy adult of the streets he would become in the intervening years. Mik had loved every incarnation of his lover, but when he thought of Harley, he always pictured him in that time period. Glowing and lovely.

The wedding itself had been a triumph. Managing to combine the two families, Hispanic and Italian under one roof had been hard enough. Trying to find the liberals among them had been a treasure hunt. In the end, a handful of the guests were relatives, every one else present was a friend. Towards the end, a tall thin man had slunk in the back, only he and Harley had noticed. When the blond saw him his eyes widened with pain and remembrance, he hissed at his lover.

"There, that bastard there. Jeff."

But the bastard had become a wreck of man, a failure who had crawled back home and heard of his friends joy. He didn't stay to say hello, but it was later found that he had left a gift. The first single the band had recorded. He had had the only copy.

That was the only close to low point of the whole day. After that it was a flurry of joy, the priest they had found to unite the two was one of those hip young men, who probably had at one time swung that way as well. The vows were exchanged, the Latino's long and flowering, the Italian's simple and loving. The rings slipped on fingers, one pair of hands had nails that still shone from the last minute realization that nail polish lingered.

The kiss had been the crowning moment, transcending the tiny chapel with a grace unfit for the homophobic relatives who could not see past their sensibilities to come. All who were there felt blessed from being able to witness it.

The party was fantastic, but almost a let down after the ceremony. There was plenty of toasting, Harley had given a great speech in his double best man capacity. There was another awwwww moment when the couple took the dance floor, proving for all time that most men did have two left feet as they both wound up on a laughing mass on the floor at the end of their song, "Born to Be Wild". Mik was never sure who had chosen the song, but he would lay money on his lover.

The couple left at the end of the night for a four day vacation to Paris which was all they could then afford. The flurry of chaos they had left behind them, settled down in the intervening week and by the time they had returned to reality, life was again humming around them. They stayed together as one fluid person, shifting from project to project. First, their respective careers and then the new house, just outside the city they had already made their home. There was talk of adoption, though both seemed to be leaning toward taking in all the scattered children of the Latino's blood line. All of that ceased when one got sick.

Mik remembered just as well what followed. The long drive to the hospital, the steadying visits trying to soak up as much of the fading presence as possible. No one could force the darker man away from his husband's side. Even Harley gave up trying to make him sleep. They needed to be together. There would be time afterward for sleep and food. For now, he had to be there as much as he could.

It was a warm day in April when the poor man, now twenty-nine years old, closed his eyes for the last time. In the end, words had been to hard for him and just squeezed his husband's hand in a final farewell, leaving him a legacy of memories, an old Victorian house and a dog named Brain.

That was when Harley started to change in earnest, Mik decided looking back. For the first time in his life with Mik, he took immediate charge of the problem at hand. He took his best friend aside after the funeral and told him the words that still stuck with Mik to this day,

"You brought me to mine, I brought you to yours. We've always known what's best for each other, but not for ourselves. I'm telling you know that you're not ready to go back home. Come stay with us a while. We can fix up an extra room and convince Tabby that Brain needs to come too."

It wasn't even the words, so much as the tone. Harley had been completely serious, mature. Before the words could leave his friends mouth, Mik knew that Cya would be coming to stay with them. Ten years ago, he would have argued. Ten years ago, he would have been pissed for Harley letting this man in to their lives in the most intrusive way possible. Ten years ago, Mik hadn't had friends.

Cyanide Torres, however, was a different man then the one Mik had fought with ten years ago. He was different from the man who had finally confessed to his best friend his affection when Harley had figured it out and threatened to tell Skids for him. He was even different from the man who had sat by his husband's bedside for the last six months, watching as the cancer ate away at him. This was a broken man.

He moved into their guest room, taking very little with him. Brain, a middle aged beagle with all the common sense of tofu, brought with him doggy smells and tastes, making more impression on the household then the waif that had been Cya. For weeks, he drifted through their lives, as they desperately tried to grasp hold of him and bring him back. His work consumed him, driving him to work twenty hours a day in the lab, grasping at the theory that had eluded his grasp for three years. Before Skids had been his rock, forcing him to come home at a decent hours, so he could see him. Now, it served only as an inspiration. He would finish a life time of work in a matter of months. And then....

It was open ended. When he wasn't working, he sat in a listless stupor, scratching behind Brain's ears and staring into space. Mik had never seen him sleeping, though he had watched his eyes fall shut as he sat, but there was a continuous flicker of motion even behind the mocha lids. Cya was a pendulum between complete frenzy and complete stillness. No tears. Not for him.

Amazingly enough, it was Mik, not Harley who came to the first solution. In the decade of friendship, Mik had come to know Cyanide just as well as Harley. His plan was simple really. The lab was shut down for a long weekend, forcing Cya to come home. Harley and Mik were waiting there. When he entered the apartment, they were sitting on the couch, pouring over pictures.

"Look, this was France! I can't believe we let him have that much caffeine!" Harley chuckled pointing to a picture that was actually blurred from the intense movement of the hyperactive Skids.

Cya paused on his way to his room, unwillingly turning his head to the open albums and loose stacks of photos. It wasn't that he had pushed Skids from his mind, it was rather that he had erected a sort of monument in his memory, creating shrine in his head that contained no living memories, only the horror and pain of their last six months. He still carried with him that gut feeling that today may be the day he wakes up to find him dead. The feeling that traveled with him all through those days, carving and perverting even their best moments. He had shunted away all their beautiful times together, but even a peripheral glance at the photos brought them all back in a flood, slamming him to his knees him sobs that wracked his thin body.

Mik and Harley were there, holding him, crying with him as they had cried together before. Not tears of pain, though that was there too, but tears of healing , of unplugging the festering wound and letting it bleed clean. Cya would never totally lose the ache or the feeling of a void that only Skids could fill, but after that day he was able to sleep again and his work lost the sharp edged madness it had taken on in the days of his hard grief.

The days that followed were almost harder then dealing with numb Cya. Now, the bitch was back and he was angry, depressed and excited by turns that left the couple spinning. He began to pour over the pictures and started to assemble them in a whole new order. It became his obsession, restacking and organizing them by date, place and the feeling of the memory. Where there weren't pictures, he wrote in his cramped neat script, so that the margins of the books were filled with snatches of memories of fights, sex and laughter. The wedding pictures were by far the most treasured and they each owned whole pages to themselves, left untouched of the witty, biting script.

It required a trip back to the home they had once shared, a hard day for all of them. They all cried again and different times, but they scavenged piles of dusty photos half-forgotten, some hailing back to the error of early high school marked with plump cheeks and pimples.

The project was complete nearly a year and half after Skids had passed on, around the same time that Dr. Torres uncovered the link between to completely incomprehensible hormones which would create a more effective treatment of all testosterone linked diseases. It would be a few years of testing before it could be of real use outside the lab, but there was already talk of a Nobel prize. Cya seemed not to notice it all, intent on finishing his other project. It finally amounted to twenty scrapbooks of every shape size and color, they were given a honored place in the Rasputin/Goldman bookcase.

Cyanide left them there on his return to his home. It was a sudden departure. Mik was holding a sleeping Harley on the couch, some half-backed film buzzing at them when Cya walked in a duffle bag packed tight and the keys to his black Acura clenched in his fist.

"Where are you going?" Mik asked wearily, blinking heavy eyelids. Cyanide had done some traveling already for his discovery, but he didn't remember him having to go overnight.

"Home," the Russian was informed. " Tell Harley, you're both free to visit in about a week. There's someone I have to spend some time with."

They came down the minute the week was up. Cyanide was in the yard, waist deep in weeds. He had started to cultivate the garden again, a project that had once taken him and Skids a whole summer, but had in recent times been left to seed. The inside of the house revealed more of his zeal. Everything was aired out, the dust cleared off and furniture uncovered. There were tiny touches all over the place of Skids. In the mural in the kitchen that covered the one blank wall, in the diplomas hanging on the walls of the once-shared office, to the vintage Buffy memorabilia that took up an entire floor to ceiling display case in the living room. It was upstairs where they had the shock. It had been a long bitter complaint of the Torres-DiAngelo house that the bedroom had been done in primary colors. Torres had longed desperately for the bedroom of his teen dreams which mostly consisted of black and red velvet draped heavily around poster encrusted walls. Though he made many concessions over the years to Skids, this was the only one he could not really reconcile to.

So on his return, realizing that he wanted to be reminded of Skids, but not drowned with those memories and thereby the despair that could still grip him, he had redone their old bedroom in that style. Leaving only the picture of Skids and him in place on the nightstand. Harley had approved and so had Mik, but for a different reason. Harley thought it was great that Cya had come to terms with Skids death. Mik thought it was great that Cya wasn't letting go again. The gesture of leaving all his meticulous work, the corpus of Skids, in their apartment had frightened him. He thought, perhaps, that Cya had again regressed to forgetfulness. This was a welcome reprieve.

Time played a trick letting the next sorrow free years pass by like lightening. It was just as quick as car that stole Harley from Mik at the end of those two years. Another victim of drunk driving, picture on a poster and in a commercial. This time it was Cya who had opened his house to Mik. This time incorporating the things from the old apartment into the house. There was room aplenty and Mik was different griever then Cya. He felt the same anguish, but he refused to forget. Not for him the obsessive collecting of pictures or denial, though he had passed through that stage. Instead, he worked on his masterpiece. His first serious art in years. Not that he had ever stopped painting, but losing Harley made him realize how much of his time and been entwined with Harley and his life. When the vivacious blond had started making waves as an agent, Mik had come to every dinner, every party and even conferences where his way was not barred. He ran Harley's business on the money end, becoming the manager's manager. It left him little of his own time, but so busy and happy he hadn't noticed.

In a grand gesture, Cya undertook the renovation of the shed for Mik's studio. He said the paint fumes made him light headed while he was writing up lectures, but he said it with the infamous Torres sneer and a glint in his eye.

The painting, like Cya's books and the subject himself, went through many forms, constantly being torn up and started again. It was only looking around at the ruins of the paintings that Mik realized his problem. He was trying to see Harley in all the different years in one painting. It was in fact, a multitude of them. After that it followed quickly into a series of paintings, starting with the dew eyed teenager at the bar and ending with the suave, smooth man that still glowed with exuberance at thirty-five.

Once the series was finished, Mik was at a loss. He had no job to return too. No great work left to paint. A long period of emptiness followed, consumed by piles of books and stacks of CDs that played endless arias until Cyanide 'accidentally' broke the player. The fit of rage that had provoked the breakage was what finally gave Mik a purpose again.

A funeral dirge was gustily being belted out through the house while Mik flipped through Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" for the third time, trying to gain actual interest in the pages. Downstairs, Cya was slowly cracking. His office was warm and comfortable, glasses he wouldn't have been caught dead in years before, rested on the bridge of his nose as he poured over his notes. As one of the youngest Nobel prize winners ever, even if had wound up sharing the prize with McDonald, Cyanide Torres was one of the most called upon lectures in Math and Science schools across the country. He often traveled for weeks at a time, but never more then a month and half. Before because he would feel the pull of home before long, now because he was afraid of what would happen to Mik if he left.

The dirge played on and he gave up working, tossed his glasses down and rubbed his temples.

"What am I supposed to do?" Cya had taken to speaking to Skids as if the rambunctious man was lounging in his favorite chair, a beaten brown thing in Cya's office. Dragged there during one of Cya's late night cram sessions and never removed. Skids' tiny piece of turf in the room that had been purely his lover's.

It wasn't as if there was an answer, but sometimes Cya would feel a deep stirring that let him know that he was being listened too. Since he had given up on God, he knew it was Skids, still laughing at him. There was nothing this too as if the young ghost was shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Dunno. Can we go for a walk now?"

Cya slammed back his chair, the old unkindled anger reawakening in his stomach, sending him up the stairs to at time until he reached the artist's room. Mik was sitting on his neat bed, for all the world just another man in repose, reading while heavy depressing music spewed forth from the player.

"Rasputin! What are you doing?"

"Reading." Mik said, staring at his friend as if he'd gone mad.

"You sit here all day long, reading and listening to music that would put dying cats to shame!" The unfortunate soprano belted out a solo. It snapped something in Cya's brain and he almost blacked out, not really coming to until the thing was in pieces on the floor.

That was what woke Mik out of his stupor to take a good long look at Cya. He stood there, chest heaving and cheeks flushed, the picture of middle aged rage. How had they come to be this old? Cya was two years shy of forty and Mik had passed that barrier three years ago, just yesterday spotting a grey hair or two in the mirror.

Now, he could see that Cya was past one hair or two. His think long brown hair that he now wore tied back in a pony tail was shot through with gray streaks. Lines had just started to crinkle at his eyes. The body was a trim as ever, owing to the three mile run Cya pushed himself through everyday, but the shoulders were slightly rounded from years of bending first over a drumset, then a lab table and now a desk. Mik looked past the age and the neat jeans and shirt and saw still the old Cya, still alive and kicking. The bastard teenager, who was the 'straight one' ready to draw blood with his sharp tongue.

It was this double image that snapped at Mik and showed him what his next profession was. He would become for Cya what he had been for Harley. It was slow going, coaxing the younger man that he didn't have to figure out how to juggle his schedule anymore. Cya had been to stubborn to work through an agent and even the thought of Mik navigating that part of his life for him was hard. Old habits never truly die, Mik thought, the day he literally wrestled the planner out of Cya's hand, bruising both of them in the process. They just lie dormant.

They coexisted peacefully enough, ringing in Cyanide's fortieth with a bottle of champagne and a maudlin evening of remembrance. The official party was the following week and would be flooded with friends, old and new. That one was theirs. It was when they finally took the last step into incorporating their lives together. It was a given that they would never share the same feelings as the ones they had once had with their first love.

Their union was more out of habit and the old, comfortable affection of familiarity. It wasn't much of a switch. Mik still spent two or three nights in his own room, never giving up that privacy and right. Mik managed and Cyanide's career flourished, topped off now with books, papers and students, who crashed in their house on weekends, staying up late talking chemistry, politics and life.

The few off days were spent in a mellow way, often in separate ventures. They didn't share many interests and respected each others needs to have their own lives. The days they did spend together were even more lazy, especially as they aged. Brunch outside in the garden watching the fourth generation of Brain's only litter chase insects, afternoons twined together on the couch, bitching about growing old, remembering the past and talking about the future.

The age gape between them had lessened, the six years that had once rankled Cyanide, seemed to be barely a few days. They were companions, friends, lovers occasionally and most of all they were there. It made the shelves of Buffy and the series of paintings in the shed only one piece of their lives, instead of the all consuming obsessions they might have been.

Often, they would talk of their inevitable deaths, discussing how one would celebrate when the other died. It was an old joke, dating back to their days of animosity, revived recently to amuse and out do each other in scale. Cyanide was winning to date with, "surrounding myself with young boys and girls on a beach in the French Riviera, sipping the finest vintage of wine, toasting to an image of you and sighing sadly, ' you would have loved it here' until all of the boys and girls were overwhelmed by my sadness and felt the need to fuck me to bliss'.

"You are a crude man, Torres." Mik had chuckled at the time, winding fingers through the still rapidly graying hair.

"At least I can aspire to being a crude old man, making grannies blush."

They lived together for thirty-seven years that way, more then twice the amount Mik had been with Harley, nearly four times as long as Cya had had Skids as his own. The memories of the lost ones had never faded, though they lost some of the idealistic luster. Had to as they could never grow old and would forever remain as unfinished adults in the minds of the men who had loved them.

It was Mik, who caught Cyanide when he blacked out and woke up his left side paralyzed. Mik, who helped put his final papers in order and Mik, who felt the pain for the third time of the hospital bed and the last goodbye.

A scant three days after Cya's death, Mik moved into action on the plan they had meticulously laid out before the final stroke. Eighty years old and still sharp as a tack, Mik started the ball rolling on the Torres Foundation, a facility that would serve to support gay and lesbian teens, especially with those of an artistic bent. Mik had been surprised by the choice, but after so long, knew better then to question the decision. Even to the end of his days, Cya had been 'bisexual' though by then he hadn't slept with a woman in nearly fifty-five years.

The main base of the foundation was a building that had started construction months before Cyanide's last days. It would open it's gates less then six months, a gallery for the young hopefuls arts. The only permanent display was the first room of the gallery. On one wall were the books of Skids, dismembered by page for maximum viewing and preserved under glass to prevent further yellowing. The other were the series of paintings, also old and showing the signs in the first cracks of paint, that showed the aging process in Harlequin Goldman. Hanging from the ceiling of the room was the title of this main room: Love is the Heart of All.

Radiating from this room, that really was the heart of the building, one could find a multitude of new artists, conference centers and the business section of the foundation. Here Mik was given a token office that he never stepped through after the opening. Instead, he remained in the old home, living out his remaining months in a reflective solitude, broken only by visits and calls from members of the foundation, who were all infused with youth and happiness over the success of the foundation.

The circle closed at last, taking Mik at eighty-one, asleep in the bed he had shared with Cya, watched over by the never moved picture of Skids and wrapped in the blanket he had preserved all these years from the old apartment.

The pictures still hang today and as dictated in a hidden notarized letter sent to Dr.Torres' lawyer, after Mikhael's passing the foundation was renamed The Rasputin and Torres Foundation for Gay and Lesbian Youth. One could easily get a walking tour of the old house which was preserved by a ground's keeper. The tour will lead you through the lovingly kept memories that echo still in the wood work. Out into the heady fragrance of the garden, a quick peek into the famous shed/workshop and a half-mile through the woods that let out into a peaceful cemetery. Here four graves, two pairs not far away from each other were well tended and piled with flowers, candles, recent papers, articles, gay pride stickers and carefully rolled up notes, the scribbled fervent prayers and wishes of mourning lovers and hopeful youth.


End file.
